Today in Connected Consumer

Today is gesture control day. Microsoft released Kinect for Windows 1.5 on Monday, an update of the Kinect for Windows platform that includes new developer tools and a spiffed-up SDK. In a blog post on the new release, Microsoft highlighted Kinect Studio, a new tool to allow developers to record and playback Kinect data, “dramatically shortening and simplifying the development lifecycle of a Kinect application.” Just in time, too, because Kinect just got some major competition from startup Leap Motion, which on Monday unveiled a $70, thumb-drive size peripheral that gives gesture control of the PC fingertip precision. It also released an SDK, initially for invited developers but shortly available to all. Leap Motion, which raised $13 million earlier this month, claims its motion sensors are 200 times more sensitive than anything else on the market, including Kinect, and can track individual finger movements to within 1/100th of a millimeter. Check out the videos here.